1kg muscle gain per month - is this typical?

[ashleymoran]

I was just chatting to another guy I know doing NROL and he said he'd noticed I'd put weight on. He asked if I kept any measurements and it made me realise I was weighed when I started my gym end of last March. (Weighed twice in a year! One day I will measure my biceps...)

I was 68kg then, and weigh about 78kg now, 10 months later. So I've put on roughly 1kg of muscle per month since I started NROL (after doing H1, H2 and S1). That's about 2.2lbs a month if you work in old money. No idea what my body fat percentage is, but I was pretty skinny when I started and I haven't visibly gained any fat. I'm 183cm tall or about 6'.

How typical is this weight gain? I've got no idea what's normal on NROL or any other training programme.

[Hunter]

I don't know if it's typical, but 22 pounds (or 10 kg for you that drive on the wrong side of the road ) is impressive!! Way to go. Have you calculated how much over maintenance cals you're eating?

Over 1 year of doing NROL, I probably gained a total of 7 or 8 pounds, but I loosely tracked my bf% and that went down, so my lean mass gain was probably in the 10 - 13 pound range. I did the Fat Loss programs as well, so I went through different cycles of gain - loss. If I had only done Strength and Hyp programs, 22 lbs would have been achievable, provided I ate enough. I think my problem is that I don't get enough cals to grow - I feel like I'm eating all the time at my desk at work if I do!!

Again, congratulations!! You must feel great!

[ashleymoran]

Originally Posted by Hunter

Again, congratulations!! You must feel great!

Ok cool! Thanks Hunter - I do feel great, but I felt great anyway without knowing whether my weight gain was impressive or not! I am just pleased with the huge strength gains I've made since I started NROL.

I've never given much thought to my calorie intake. I don't even know what my maintenance level is. I reckon my daily intake varies a lot in the 1800 - 2500 calorie range. The 1800 calorie meal I just invented in my head as an exercise is pretty substantial though.

I eat a paleo/stone-age/caveman/hunter-gatherer or whatever you wanna call it diet. I eat a lot of meat (mostly fatty cuts) and vegetables, some fruit and nuts, and a few eggs. No grains, dairy, potatoes, sugar and processed food. I generally have one meal a day - I train around 1-2pm and eat some time between 3 and 7pm. I've eaten this way for almost 4 years now, but my body composition didn't really start to change until I hit NROL last spring.

I guess if you re simultaneously trying to lose fat and gain muscle it must be hard to track the progress in each. I take photos roughly once a month so I can see my progress (I make sure nobody sees them though!!!) Maybe you should do the same hunter? Your eyes might be a better judge than the scales.

[Irishman301]

Wow, one meal a day @ 1800 calories!! That's crazy that you were able to make those gains with that type of diet and NROL.

Did you ever consider trying to do the six small meal a day thing? Or even 3 meals a day with protien shakes or other healthy snacks in between? You may get some much better gains.

[Hunter]

Originally Posted by ashleymoran

I guess if you re simultaneously trying to lose fat and gain muscle it must be hard to track the progress in each.

You've got that right, but it was more a matter of my priorities changing throughout the year. (I wanted to look good with a shirt off during the summer.) It would be fun to go through a whole 6 or 9 months of cycling HT and strength programs, but the vain part of me wants to make sure I've got some definition in the abs and my waist size stays the same.

Originally Posted by ashleymoran

I take photos roughly once a month so I can see my progress (I make sure nobody sees them though!!!) Maybe you should do the same hunter? Your eyes might be a better judge than the scales.

I haven't taken photos, but I did take some measurements. If you haven't read this, scroll down to post #18 in the following thread and you'll see some of my results from the year of NROL:

Done

[ashleymoran]

Originally Posted by Hunter

I haven't taken photos, but I did take some measurements. If you haven't read this, scroll down to post #18 in the following thread and you'll see some of my results from the year of NROL:

Hey there's some pretty good progress there. Shame you hurt yourself squatting though. Are you any closer to the 300lb squat yet?

I wish I'd taken some measurements at the start. I do, however, have every NROL workout saved in spreadsheets with dates, so I can see when I was working hard and when I was slacking.

[Hunter]

Originally Posted by ashleymoran

Hey there's some pretty good progress there. Shame you hurt yourself squatting though. Are you any closer to the 300lb squat yet?

I haven't been pursuing it lately. I'm doing workouts from Power Training that incorporate explosive moves, and I've been trying to do lighter weights with other exercises and performing the reps as fast as possible. These should help when I return to strength training. I'll probably do NROL Strength I and possibly III beginning in April after vacation.

[ashleymoran]

Forums are back up and running I see I was getting withdrawal symptoms

Originally Posted by Irishman301

Wow, one meal a day @ 1800 calories!! That's crazy that you were able to make those gains with that type of diet and NROL.

Well when I say one 1800Cal meal, I may spend an hour or two eating. eg I might get in and have a few nuts and some apples (which can amount to a good few hundred Cal on its own), and an hour later prepare my main meal. But in general my eating window is only a few hours a day.

Originally Posted by Irishman301

Did you ever consider trying to do the six small meal a day thing? Or even 3 meals a day with protien shakes or other healthy snacks in between? You may get some much better gains.

Nah, I couldn't eat that many times a day. For a start I don't know when I'd find time to eat! I hate eating breakfast, it makes me hungry and food-conscious all day.

I don't eat protein shakes, I exclude them from my diet on the basis that their is no such thing as a protein-shake tree. Plus they are all milk-based aren't they? I am milk intolerant and have avoided even the slightest drop of the stuff for four years. However I eat a lot of meat, 500g-1kg a day (typically around 650g I think), so I'm not really in any need of more protein.

I'm not primarily after weight gain - my main focus is strength. My deadlift 1RM has gone up 5kg a week pretty reliably lately. If I sustained that (although prob not, due to fitting H3 in somewhere) I'd hit Hunter's goal of a 400lb deadlift (180kg - 2.5x my current bodyweight) in early July. I'd be made up if I could pull that off!

Right now NROL is giving me more gains than I ever expected, so I'm happy to carry on as I am until I hit a hurdle.

[ashleymoran]

I just did a quick calculation. Say I eat 500-800g meat a day, and 20% of that is protein. Then in a typical month, my protein intake is somewhere between

0.5kg * 0.2 * 30 = 3kg, and
0.8kg * 0.2 * 30 = 4.8kg

If I'm gaining weight at 1kg a month, that means 20-33% of my protein intake is being turned into muscle. Puts a perspective on it anyway.

I've got a copy of Designing Resitance Training programmes that I bought last summer (mainly because half the references in the back of NROL are to this book!). Haven't opened it for months but by chance the bookmark was on p91, ("Body Composition Changes") and apparently the largest consistently reported gains for drug-free adults are 0.3kg/week (1.3kg a month), so I'm not doing too bad.

I might make an effort to weigh myself at the start and end of each programme now. And maybe after I've finished NROL I'll do all the Hyptertrophy workouts back-to-back as an experiment.